• Recognizing stakeholders: interest and expertise confer standing.

• Recognizing stakeholders: interest and expertise confer standing.
A couple hundred years ago, the white guys in whigs demanded, No taxation without representation! This was a practical expression of the core democratic principle that those who are most affected by a decision should have the biggest say. It's true that many of these same fellows hoped for a republic ruled by a disinterested elite-- people who put the national welfare above their own personal interest (because, it went without saying, they were already unassailably wealthy). For a few years, that ideal seemed possible, thanks largely to the p.r. skills of the intensely ambitious Geo. Washington. Now and then we still hear echoes of those times, as when devotees proclaim the virtues of the latest millionaire politician who's bought himself political office: "he's too rich to need bribes." But while there are still great areas of our lives over which we have little or no say --working conditions come to mind-- for the most part it's harder for us now to believe in the selfless rich. We want to decide for ourselves the course of our lives.

As always, the problem is that our decisions almost always affect other people in some way. If China's energy demand affects my weather and my war taxes, so do my gas-guzzling ways affect the Chinese, the Iraqis, the hunters of the Arctic Circle and the asthmatic kid next door. The job I have, the music I play, the way I treat the neighbors, the trash I throw out, all these and a hundred more features of my "private" life change the world for others in direct and indirect ways. Because I’m richer than most people I infringe on their lives more than, on average, they do on mine. Used to be rich people had all sorts of elaborate mechanisms to hide from themselves the effects they had on other people, but our telecomm means not only do we have greater impact, it’s also harder to keep our heads in the sand. Hence the ferocious backlash of the rich against any form of accountability (which they call “political correctness”): it’s my right to empty my bowels wherever I want, and not only can you not stop me, merely to describe the mess is an attack on my god-given freedom.

Most people aren’t such puling babies. We recognize our common interests. Still, it’s tricky to share decisions within a family, never mind a whole community, or a continent. How do we keep each other mindful of all the people affected by our walk in the world?

Our ancestors employed a variety of social controls, a toolkit of formal and informal penalties and rewards to curb crime and promote cooperation. These have become less effective as so many of our relationships become impoverished, monetized, or reduced to coincidence of location. In my neighborhood, rather than talk to each other, residents routinely complain to the cops about noisy motorbikes, junky yards, and uncut grass. The offenders take offense: my home, none of your business. One guy brought chains to a city council meeting to protest an ordinance against parking cars on lawns; that’s like slavery, he said. The attitude was, It's no business of yours what I do with my own property.

A term we often use in this context is "stakeholder." A stakeholder is a person or group that has a stake --an interest-- in the outcome of a particular course of action. For effective and democratic decision-making, we try to involve all the major stakeholders. But it's not always easy to figure out who has a legitimate stake in a decision. There are all sorts of ways to define stakes and stakeholders.

Marxists define interest largely by economic role, and the rest of us do too --the Textile Jobs Export Council or United Clerks Local #374-- or simply by income (e.g. households with incomes from 125% to 150% of the poverty line). For many years even white men couldn't vote unless they held a certain amount of property. The economic definition becomes absurd when the billion-dollar stake of a fictional corporate "person" outweighs the livelihoods of hundreds of working families.

Sometimes we use geography: everyone who lives in such-and-such a place belongs to our community. This is a way of excluding or giving low priority to absentee owners or transnational corporations. WalMart or a mine operator may have millions invested in a town, but the major owners are in fact far less affected by the company's operations there than are local employees, customers, and other residents who bear the costs of economic stagnation, environmental degradation, loss of tax base, etc. etc.

On the other hand, mere residence is not always enough to entitle us to participate. Historically, every community has had a class of outsiders, non-citizens not allowed to participate in governance-- slaves or criminals, migrant workers, the unemployed, women, children, or unbelievers. That's why we like to say, Get a job! or Go back to Russia! to people of suspect tendencies: we try to classify them out of the political process.

Trial juries seem to embody principles of both interest and disinterest. On the one hand, jury members are supposed to be our "peers"-- like the defendants in some important way, in some way typical of the community, sharing common interests and points of view-- presumably in order to fairly represent the community. On the other hand, they are supposed to be unaffected by and initially ignorant of the crime in question, so that they can render “impartial” judgment.

Naturally the stakeholder question is a common theme of mass politics. Who has legitimate standing to take part in an issue, who has an authentic interest? Democratizing groups try to make it clear when outside interests threaten the community welfare. We talk about workers and consumers and communities, and corporations and the rich. Meanwhile, the talking heads of the mass media (remarkably, all born in sharecroppers' shanties but millionaires now through sheer grit and pluck) champion the Common Man against the depredations of a liberal elite who conspire from their Hollywood palaces to resurrect Saddam and turn your women into lesbians or college professors. Rather than talk about what policies serve whose interests, the heads do their best to enforce the divisions of ethnicity, gender and religion as the proper markers of an individual’s stake in society.

Some folks do indeed deserve special attention because of their special interests in a issue --the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, the anti-war moms in the U.S., for example-- but even here we need to avoid confusing their expertise and stake with some special, inherent virtue that excludes other voices. After all, among the actual mothers of soldiers, there may well be more pro-war than anti-war sentiment, especially at the beginning of conflicts (late conversions, after countless murders, just don't help as much). Because of their special status, even or especially in hierarchical societies, moms, religious professionals, techicians and other specialists may have at least a thin extra layer of insulation that protects them from reprisal just a little longer than other folks, so they can speak against injustice with just a little less risk. But mass murder and looting affect us all, and we all need to have a say. We shouldn't have to prove our individual deservingness to be heard, any more than mothers should be ignored when not talking about their kids.

There is no single best way to define one person's interests in comparison with another's. It's like the Hubble space telescope using different wavelengths to photograph the universe. Different questions of interest bring to light different sets of stakeholders. But because of the principle of participation by those most affected, we have to try to make these distinctions.

The stakeholders' question goes to the heart of the democrat / authoritarian divide. On the one hand we have folks who believe the government (that is, we together) should have a big say in the economy and very little about our sex lives or adventures in the local library. In this democratic scenario, an employer does not have the sole right to, say, move a factory to Mexico, because he's not the only one who's affected by the decision. On the other hand, consensual sex among adults is off limits to government; it concerns no one but the parties directly involved.

Other folks have a different idea. They claim to have discovered something they call "property," which they take to mean the field of decisions in which the individual alone has a say, godlike in his splendid, sovereign isolation; no one else has any legitimate interest or right to take part. This local god can close a factory or bulldoze a wetland for any reason or no reason at all; they are his "property". (Never mind the fact there has never in the history of the world existed absolute property rights, any more than there has ever existed an absolutely "free market.") At the same time, the godling takes upon himself the authority to police his neighbors' sex lives, and the books they read, and the drugs they take. Some people would claim that other people's sex lives do affect them --the contagion model of sex orientation. They are more correct in understanding that controlling sex practices and distribution is an important tool for controlling the labor force and metastasizing the consumer market.

Most of us hold a mix of controlling and accommodating attitudes. But the dividing line falls most clearly in how people allocate the right to take part in decisions. In a democracy those rights are based in part on one's self-interest.


A commitment to stakeholders' participation entails goals that are not easy to reconcile. On the one hand, I want the people most affected by a policy to have the biggest say in making it. On the other, I recognize that most decisions have ripple effects throughout society. What's more, I want more people to acknowledge a much broader field of responsibility than we've generally been comfortable with. I don't know every sparrow that falls, but I damn sure ought to know how many Indonesians could live for a year on what I spend on books, or how many people die in the wars that I fund.

The late Beverly Brown wrote about the stakeholder problem when she was working with forest workers in the Pacific Northwest. There are all sorts of conflicts out there, with each of the parties claiming a special stake in the outcome. You've got long-established families and newly arrived exurbanites fighting over land prices and forest uses. You've got resident Anglo timber workers with different fears and prospects from the mostly migrant Latino and Asian workers who collect mushrooms and salal in what remains of the forests. You've got tourism and logging companies. And that's just touching the surface of a very complex set of interlocking and competing interests. There have been various attempts to develop lasting policies that could at least in part satisfy a wide range of interests.

The question is the same whatever challenge we face: who needs to be at the table when we're crafting solutions, and who gets the biggest say? Who has "standing"? In the Northwest, people whose families had been there for generations had every right to be upset with newcomers who came in and jacked up land prices and posted No Trespassing signs all over the place. But what about migrant workers? They work in the local forests only part of the year. Does that mean they have no legitimate stake in forest policy? What about people like me? I want a say in forest policy even though I live so far away, not so much to keep down the costs of my new deck, or because someday I might want to buy a postcard out there, but because those forests are part of my planet's last treasure of biodiversity.

For some issues, we recognize a very wide range of legitimate stakeholders. I don't have kids, but I'm rightly expected to cough up tax money to help pay for public education. Caring for children is a responsibility we all share. (But beware! Once embarked upon child care and public education, we're halfway down that slippery slope toward government interference against child abuse and overpopulation.) Likewise, spreading out the costs of old age through Social Security benefits almost everyone, even those who die before they retire, by limiting uncertainty and also the costs that we'd otherwise have to bear, like, I dunno, stadium-sized crematoria.

Even billionaires may have a legitimate stake in public policy. To the extent that policy affects their personal opportunities for meaningful work, access to health care, their children’s welfare, or how many calories they consume, they have just as much right to a voice as the rest of us.

And despite the claims of a few enthusiasts ("Go back to Iraq, ya *%&$^@%# liberals!" To which some of us reply, Who you callin liberal?), most of us also understand that we all have a stake in war policy. Was it Clemenceau who said that war is too important to be left up to the generals?

But broadening the field of stakeholders brings its own very significant problems of scale. It's hard enough to get a whole family to discuss an issue and reach some sort of agreement, never mind a town or a nation. After a certain point, lengthy decision processes become the opposite of inclusive, because we have so many other demands on our time and patience. We may keep the formal right to participate but the costs get way too high for most people. We end up leaving the decisions to the iron behinds who can simply outlast all other participants. Perhaps you have met such budding Bormanns in your own organizations.

What complicates matters further is that interest is partly subjective. We know on a small scale within our own organizations some folks are much more enthusiastic or upset about an issue than others. We tend to defer to their greater commitment or louder voices. We also have different intensities of interest in regional and national issues that do not reflect a specific material stake. My next door neighbor might be a lot more concerned than I about climate change-- though if he gets wiped by drought or hurricane, so will I. Does that mean he should have a bigger say, or that I can discount him as a nutcase? His hours of work on this issue don't tell us much about how he'd be affected, but do show us his priorities.

Finally, we recognize that wrenching change is likely to be a fact of life for many generations to come, even if we were somehow freed of corrosive capitalism. In fact, we demand certain changes, big ones. So we've also got to make provisions for the people most affected. We can’t let coal miners, soldiers, kids or any other group pay all the costs of changes that benefit our society as a whole.